Global Game Jam 2009 Impressions

It is now 12:00 and I officially quit the global game jam.
For those who don't know what I'm talking about an explanation follows.

The global game jam is a worldwide event, in which game developers meet in different parts of the world, for a 48 hours session of game development.
The objective is to make a working prototype/game in the said amount of time, utilizing no sleep what-so-ever.
This is the first year it is held worldwide and in turn the first time it's held in Israel.

I decided to join this event thinking, I can really make it and have a finished game by the end of the jam.
Here's the problem, I don't know Flash or any other rapid prototyping platform, which is a problem when your are trying to create a game in 48 hours.
The only thing remotely similar to that which I know is Silverlight.

So innocently I tried to make a game in Silverlight, I had a graphical designer on my "staff", but that didn't help since Silverlight sucks at creating games.
There were a few problems I encountered:

• Silverlight doesn't have any movie clip component, that means that key frame animation is out of the door.
  Although eventually I did find an open source code that gives that ability the other problem killed me.
• Silverlight doesn't have an absolute coordinates system, another important feature for a game, especially the one that I tried to make which was a platform game.
  a Gaame like that involves a lot of collision detection, which is hard to do when you have no normal way to know where your objects are.

After battling with the game for about 27 hours, I finally decided to quit (the graphical designer quit a long time before I did :) ).
I'm still gonna hang in there till the final stretch, completing some homework I have, just to see the end results of some other people.

What did I learn in this event:

• I have to learn Flash
• I hate Silverlight
• Creating a game in 48 hours is tough
• Not sleeping in that time is tougher

In coclusion, the event was really cool, about 50 people came, a really large group for such a small country.
But, it was really frustraing not to get any real game done.

Maybe next year...

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